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Al Gore turned 60 today and kicked off a new campaign to cool the planet.

The Alliance for Climate Protection’s “we” campaign will employ online organizing and television advertisements on shows ranging from “American Idol” to “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” It highlights the extent to which Americans’ growing awareness of global warming has yet to translate into national policy changes, Gore said in an hour-long phone interview last week. He said the campaign, which Gore is helping to fund, was undertaken in large part because of his fear that U.S. lawmakers are unwilling to curb the human-generated emissions linked to climate change.

“This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public’s sense of urgency in addressing this crisis,” Gore said. “I’ve tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it.”

Full story here.

Yes, using the “L” Word as an epithet is back in style, and not only by those you would expect to use it.  The Washington Post reports:

But as Obama heads into the final presidential primaries, Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have already started to brand him a standard-order left-winger, “a down-the-line liberal,” as McCain strategist Charles R. Black Jr. put it, in a long line of Democratic White House hopefuls.
 
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he took in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care and an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. “The evidence is that the more [voters] have been learning about him, the more his coalition has been shrinking,” Clinton strategist Mark Penn said.

I would expect that tired old attack from McCain’s camp, but from Hillary?  From a fellow liberal Democrat?

Yes, her campaign used it in the same way that Republicans have been using it since back during the Bush Sr. campaign when Dukakis was branded by The Right as a “Liberal.”  They used the label as an insult, and now the Clinton campaign is doing the same thing against another Democrat. 

The attack is both unconscionable and ridiculous.  Clinton attacks Obama from the Left for not being as liberal as she is on health care and then, when things get tough, she does the GOP’s dirty work for them and attacks him from the Right for running on a liberal platform.

Dukakis didn’t respond to the “L” Word attack very well, and his weak response, among other things, cost him the election.

Obama has responded not by embracing the term, like Dukakis should have done.  He could have said what Krugman says in his latest book:

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty.  I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.  That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.

Instead Obama says the labels “Liberal” and “Conservative” have lost their meaning and are outdated, and he has a point.  The traditional meanings of the words have been turned upside down.  Again, quoting Krugman:

One of the seeming paradoxes of America in the early twenty-first century is that those of us who call ourselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative, while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical.  Liberals want to restore the middle-class society I grew up in; those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history.  Liberals defend long-standing institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions.  Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want the president to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisons people without charges and subjects them to torture.

Clinton’s labeling of Obama as “liberal” today makes her look like a bratty kid in a playground spat.  It’s almost as if she was hoping to catch him off guard and make him look ridiculous by getting him to respond with the equivalent of, “I know you are but what am I?”  But it is she who looks ridiculous.

This episode of the way-too-long campaign has lowered my opinion of her to a level where I would find it difficult to actively support her should she somehow win the nomination. Like I said before, it’s unconscionable and, in the end, it should remove any chance of her winning the nomination.

Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. were interviewed this morning on NPR.  During the segment Michael Stipe discussed the lyrics to “Living Well is the Best Revenge” from their forthcoming album, Accelerate.

[The track] takes its title and inspiration from the English clergyman and metaphysical poet, George Herbert. “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” is a common phrase, and the band admits to only recently discussing what the term really means. Buck jokingly adds, “When I was 15, I had no idea what that meant. That made no sense to me. I thought revenge was the best revenge.”

Stipe had been reading much about the media around that time, and “Living Well” was his response. He imagines himself in the song turning a table onto a television personality, singing:

“Don’t turn your talking points on me,
history will set me free
The future’s ours and you don’t
even read the footnote now!
So who’s chasing you? Where did you go?
You disappeared mid-sentence
In a judgment crisis I see my anecdote for it
You weakened shell.

All your sad and lost apostles hum my
name and flare their nostrils
Choking on the bones you toss to them
Well I’m not one to sit and spin
‘Cause living well’s the best revenge
Baby, I am calling you on that

Stipe admits that the act is a little immature, but ultimately cathartic.

Because the lyrics include “talking points” and “sit and spin” it’s easy to imagine Bill O’Reilly as the target of his rage.  I wonder how long it will be before Mr. Bill says their interview on NPR was just “Drive-By Stuff” and then bribes them, like he did Springsteen, to appear on his show.

Anyway, if you are in the mood to listen to an R.E.M. concert, you can stream their complete one hour and thirty-six minute concert from SXSW on the NPR website.

Roger Cohen wrote a column published in Thursday’s New York Times where he looks back to his time as a child spent in South Africa during the apartheid years and reasses his feelings in light of Obama’s speech.  I really do like this bit from the column:

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.

One need only turn on one of the many 24-hour news channesl, Fox in particular, to see how Bush’s black-and-white world view has permeated the mainstream media.  It’s gotten to the point where if you want to watch anything close to an intellectual discussion on T.V., you’ve got to watch “comedy” shows like The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher.

So has discussion of Obama’s speech lifted the intellectual level of cable news to a higher plane?  Apparently not.

John McCain, who claims he is the most qualified candidate for Commander and Chief, made some “misstatements” about who was supposedly training Al Qaeda in Iraq:

Mr. McCain said at a news conference in Amman that he continued to be concerned about Iranians “taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.” Asked about that statement, Mr. McCain said: “Well, it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.”

It was not until he got a quiet word of correction in his ear from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was traveling with Mr. McCain as part of a Congressional delegation on a nearly weeklong trip, that Mr. McCain corrected himself.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. McCain said, “the Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda.”

And it wasn’t the only time he “misspoke.”  He made the same mistake earlier in a radio interview with The Hugh Hewitt Show.

Yes, the Republican candidate for president who in January admitted to not knowing much about how the economy works now shows that he doesn’t know much about what’s going on in Iraq either.  Sounds like the perfect replacement for our current president.

The billionaire whiteys that control the U.S. media and thus the political discourse in our country called out Obama to defend offensive remarks delivered in sermons made by his longtime pastor and, instead of crumpling like a shamed puppy, he delivered a brilliant speech in Philadelphia today.  I would say it’s right on par with the speech he gave at the 2004 convention.  Excerpts:

…

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

…

On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

…

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

…

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

…

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

…

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

…

(link to transcript of speech)

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president that could organize his thoughts into eloquent prose and then deliver that prose in an emotional, inspiring speech?  Now that would be change in a dramatic fashion. 

Read it all here.

Some happy thoughts from Bob Herbert today:

Maybe now we can stop listening to the geniuses who insisted that the way to nirvana was to ignore the broad national interest while catering to the desires of those who were already the wealthiest among us.

…

Former Senator Bill Bradley, in a conversation the other day, described the amount of public and private indebtedness in the U.S. as “ominous.” In his book, “The New American Story,” Mr. Bradley said:

“For almost a generation, America has cheated our future and lived only in the here and now. Economic growth depends on the level of investment in both physical capital — machines, infrastructure, technology — and human capital, which consists of the combined skills and health of our work force.”

Instead of making those investments, we’ve neglected our physical and human infrastructure, squeezed the daylights out of the work force (now a fearful and demoralized lot) and tried to hide the resulting debacle behind the fool’s gold of debt and denial.

Read the whole column here and remember we didn’t have to end up where we are today.  We did not have to start this three trillion dollar war, we did not have to cut taxes for the super rich, we could have used a portion of the trillions spent on the war and the billions in additional tax revenues to provide health insurance for every child in America, to provide a base level of health insurance for those of us who cannot afford it, to invest in our decaying infrastructure, to improve our schools, to invest in alternative forms of energy, to clean up our environment, and the list goes on and on…

These are things that the most citizens of the United States want.  Bush didn’t deliver to most citizens.  He delivered billions to “his base” in the form of tax cuts, and he delivered what will end up being trillions to the military industrial complex.

The question now is whether or not we can reverse direction and start making up the lost ground of the Bush years.  Certainly not if we elect McCain as our next president.  He campaigns as if a continuation of Bush’s war and making permanent Bush’s tax cuts for the rich is the right direction.

Take a good look around and see where Bush has led us:  The financial markets are headed for a meltdown, unemployment is on the rise, we’re entering into a recession, the dollar is way down, the price of oil is over $100 a barrel, the earth is heating up, the number of uninsured is on the rise, the war won’t end, our civil liberties have been curtailed, and our country’s reputation has been sullied by Bush’s use of illegal detention and torture.  Bush has been a miserable failure in every regard.

If the Democrats can’t take advantage of the current situation and win the November presidential election, you might as well kiss this country goodbye.  You won’t recognize it in four more years.

Yesterday Clinton won Ohio by a big margin, the Texas Primary by a close margin and either lost or was very close in the Texas Caucus.  She also won the small state of Rhode Island by a big margin.  Obama won Vermont by a big margin.

So what does this “Clinton Comeback” mean?  If you are talking about math, then it doesn’t mean much at all.  According to The New York Times tally of pledged delegates, she picked up twelve and Obama still leads by 140:  1360 to 1220.  If you are talking about momentum, we’ll have to wait and see.

What I’ve heard from several media sources today is that it’s nearly impossible for Clinton to catch up in pledged delegates.  She’d have to win all of the remaining contests by something like 65-35 margins.  It’s also not likely that Obama will reach the total of 2025 pledged delegates to lock the nomination.

That brings us to the superdelegate question.  How will they vote?  How should they vote?  Well, right now Clinton leads 254 – 202 with 256 not yet choosing to vote.  As to how they should vote, well I agree with the argument that says they should end up supporting the candidate chosen by all the people that voted in all the caucuses and primaries (excluding the two all of the Democrats agreed to exclude:  Florida and Michigan.)  That would seem to favor Obama, and yes that is who I favor.  (If you are Washington State resident and you want to tell your superdelegates how you think they should vote, see below post.)

But this isn’t just a math problem complicated by what happens in the superdelegate backroom at the convention this summer.  It’s also a political problem.  If the Democrats want to win the November election, they need to have a candidate that can beat McCain. 

My gut tells me that Obama can beat McCain.  I think that his position on the war and on taxes is in line with what a clear majority of Americans think:  The war must end, and we must start collecting taxes to pay for it and start paying down the debt.  The majority of Americans also think we should find a way to extend healthcare to all Americans.  Obama’s plan would leave more people out than Clinton’s plan, but his plan is far better than McCain’s and probably less controversial for independents. 

Obama also has legions of supporters, and many of them are young and getting into politics for the first time in their lives.  They will be excited about an Obama candidacy and they will actively support his campaign for the presidency.  Obama is also very appealing to independent voters.  He will be able to win over many of them with his less combative style, and his inspiring rhetoric.

Is he capable of the job?  I think he is without a doubt capable of being a great president.

What about Hillary?  She too is capable of being a great president.  But my gut tells me that if Hillary gets the nomination, she will lose to McCain no matter what she does or how well she campaigns.  Why?  Well like it or not, a lot of young Obama supporters will be pissed off if Clinton loses the pledged delegate count and wins the nominatin because of the superdelegate vote.  If that happens they’ll see the presidential race as just “the same old same old” and quickly lose interest.  As result, the Democrats will not only lose the 2008 election, they will also miss out on enfranchising a whole new generation of voters.  I also think that because of Clinton’s past history and her combative style, more independents will choose McCain over Clinton.

Bottom line:  If Obama wins the nomination, I will be excited about casting my vote for him as president, and I will expect him to win.  If Clinton wins the nomination, I will cast my vote for her, but I won’t be very excited about it, and I won’t think she’ll win.

And how to contact them…